Photo Mechanic Lite and Pro 2.0r15 for Mac, posted today, add support for the Protect feature of Nikon D-series cameras, enabling shooters to tag images in the camera and have that tag automatically recognized when files are browsed.

It's a small but welcome change in the Mac image browsing duo aimed at photojournalists and other professional photographers, especially those shooting with a Nikon D1X (or the upcoming D1H), which have a dedicated Protect button on the back of the camera. One push of the button protects the photo (actually, it's marked as a read-only file in the card's file system); when the photo is viewed in Photo Mechanic on the Mac later, that program automatically interprets the photo's read-only (locked, in Mac-speak) status and applies a tag to the photo.

Pressing the dedicated Protect button onthe Nikon D1X or D1H changes the statusof the file to read-only. The same occurswhen a file is protected in the D1, onlyprotecting a file with that camera isa cumbersome process.

The r15 release of both the Lite and Pro versions also improve both batch and single captioning functionality; the Pro version improves interoperability with JobMinder. The updates are free for licensed users of previous v2.0 versions.